Blue
by Summoner Lenne10
Summary: River is the ship, and the ship is River. For one is Birthed where they are Home, and Serenity is Home in the sea of the sky. The River of the Past had a home once, but she has long since been scattered to the wind. River-centric one shot.


1 _Blue_

_I'm nobody! Who are you?  
Are you nobody, too?  
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!  
They'd banish us, you know._

_How dreary to be somebody!  
How public, like a frog  
To tell your name the livelong day  
To an admiring bog!_

_~Emily Dickinson_

River is the ship, and the ship is River. She always was, from the moment that she was Birthed from Sleep within the deepest, hidden crevices of the star-borne vessel, and its gray walls sang of worlds and guns and vagrants. (For one is Birthed where they are Home, and Serenity is Home in the sea of the sky. The River of the Past had a home once, but she has long since been scattered to the wind.) But that eternal moment of Shipdom was Always, because the time before the Always is a time of Nothing. River can be in many places at once, and nowhere at all, and one of the times is the Nothing time. When she was broken and prodded and cut into, Over and Over and Over with sharp scalpels in her amygdala and voices and weapons training and Make It Stop Just Kill Me Now Please Oh God _Why_.

That was Nothing. The time before Nothing was something else, computably impossible- nothing can exist before Nothing. Nothing is a state of being, but there cannot be anything before Nothing.

And yet sometimes she is There as well. Sometimes she is running home and hugging her father and dancing for Simon to see, around in circles, on her toes and leaping in the air, and reading his textbook and logically stating that the Hypthundic Theory of Space Travel is fundamentally flawed because a wave of matter can only travel proportionate to the acceleration of the speed of light in that current dimension, and her dress is blue as it spins and their hands are blue and they're Hurting Her Hurting Her _Hurting Her_.

But River is not just herself. Herself is not defined, herself is not a thing of substance- she was once an ice swan, beautiful and poised, but she cracked and melted and is not Together anymore. She flits and flows, and swirls. And so River is Everyone, and Everyone is River. She Hears everything. She Knew things before, but now she Knows and Hears. She's Knows the Shepherd's past, deep down in the corners and canvases of his mind where he keeps it locked up in a cage like a bird with its wings clipped, (though it's really very obvious and she does not understand why the rest of the crew cannot see), and that he also is made of many spinning moving parts, all twirling and trying to be held together and succeeding, for now. She Knows that Jayne betrayed them, and he is the only one who can see River clearly.

She Knows that Simon loves his sister (Simon does not know she does not exist anymore, that this glued together mess of broken pieces he still calls River is never and _can_ never be His River), but he is not Whole. He is caught in the web of her broken pieces, and she's ripping him to shreds. She cuts into him over and over and over with surgical precision and perhaps if she removes a section more of the Pons it will efficiently create the desired effect and soon he will be Nothing too, and he still loves her, and she cries bloody tears of blue as Serenity sings, and he longs for the Past, when everything was simpler and he did not know River was shattered. She knows that The Girl is the most promising specimen they have ever acquired, and with a few more ounces of Grey Matter removed, perhaps shutting down a few more vital Emotional Barriers she can become the weapon they need-

The voices define River. She hears everything, because River is a cat, walking through the night, slinking into the Nothingness. She is Nothing, but she is Nothing with ears. She is the ears of the 'verse, and the ears of the Crew, and each voice becomes her, because she wants to eat strawberries and she can speak of This Land and wants to throttle Mal as very much as she wants to grab him and kiss him senseless, and she needs to finish her Rudimentary Gravitational Physics homework and they're poking sharp needles in her eyes to test the limits of her strength, her endurance, and she's falling to pieces and no one can hear her cry-

The voice she Hears loudest is Simon's. River does not have enough parts left to work, but love does not heed this lament. So she loves him more than any power in the 'verse, and wishes he would take a bullet to her head and lay her down in the blue flowers of the Worlds they can never call Home again- she drained the heart out of anything she touched- and then he will live his life in skies of pink and fields of green with Kaylee and he can smile and not be held beneath the river gasping on oxygen, suffocating and drowning because he has no choice, because he loves her. Simon wants her to be healed, to be the River That Once Was, but that girl never existed. That girl is from Before The Nothing. She has melted away, never to return. And in her absence River needs to be everyone, absorb everyone. Serenity functions in this matter to survive as well. By herself Serenity is Nothing- an empty hull. But they come, and fill her up, and give her _life_. They dance around inside, with their sullen language and trysts and feuds and _love_, and they make Serenity _Whole_. When they leave her, she's Alone and Cold and Barren. So Serenity understands River, and River understands Serenity. River is Serenity. River is the ship.

Because when Serenity is Whole, when she is composed of so many fragmented parts that are bonded in a carelessly, incomprehensibly glued together concoction- like a child's art craft, paying no attention to Diane's law of Structural Reality- somehow it works. Somehow the spinning parts fit together, and they're beautiful.

For when River is Serenity, she doesn't need to continue to attempt to compute for Simon the illogical conclusion that his _mei-mei_ can surface again from this broken body and splintered mind. By Hoxer's theory of spatial reality one object in spatial time can only ever be in one location at once, one thing at a time, in any time, for all times are One. She doesn't need to attempt to glue herself together- she can be a hull, waiting to be filled. No identity except those around her. She lost herself in those days that can no longer exist in any reality. The Alliance took that girl, that twirling spinning girl, and they shattered her with the Blue- hands and rooms and computations of the most efficient way to twist a man's neck and shatter his spinal cord in 2.3 seconds. But now all that remains is the black, the black and the warm inside.

Hoxer's theory states that one object can only be anywhere at once, and so the Blue cannot exist without River. For River displays every aspect of Blue. That's what those _Ching-wah tsao duh liou mahng_ bastards intended. China doll, used by the state, wind her up and discard her when she's broken. Rivers are blue, and without River the Blue is Nothing too. She runs through currents, breaking violently against the rocky shore, endlessly flowing towards the ocean. Eternal suffocating piercing Blue, and they want to destroy the tiny pieces scattered on the wind of River that the crew desperately hunts down. They try to stop the Wind- No one can stop a gale, it will blow freely where Man cannot, and twist and twirl and never stop. River is just a leaf on the wind, and her Destiny is lost to her; has been stripped from her naked bones and desecrated flesh by hands of the brightest terror. She soars as Serenity soars, with no regard to any choice she has in the matter- she doesn't have control of where she's headed, she is not enough of a Real Girl to decipher what shards remain of Fate. The others fill her up and decide that for her. But when River is gone so is the Blue. All gone, all color drained but the black.

And when all that is left is the black, I can be whole.

A/n: Part 2. Original version mentioned a part where I apologized for this having no plot. I was apologizing because I have a bad tendency to write reflection fics- what's going through so and so's head- and usually I actually find those annoying. I take that back now. This is my favorite thing I've ever written. I've put so much symbolism into every single line and word, and it all fits so perfectly together I could write 6 pages on it, and I probably will at some point. I make no apologies for this. I LOVE IT. I hope you love it too

Now for the Chinese rant River has at the end. I tried to find a pinyin translator to translate something random into it, but… couldn't find it. So I eventually just looked through a site of Firefly translations of stuff they said and this one worked best. I'm sure the grammar is shot to hell, so if anyone actually speaks Chinese and can give me a better random profanity to put in there, please do. Otherwise I'm sorry.

_Playlist for this story:_

Birdie- Vanessa Carlton

Blue Lips- Regina Spektor

Prisoners- Regina Spektor

Chinese dictionary-

_Mei Mei-_ little sister

_Ching-wah tsao duh liou mahng- _frog humping son of a bitch


End file.
